Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-developing-a-magnetic-shield-to-protect-astronauts-from-cosmic-radiation
This may require some refinement (to say the least). The human bodies are not very keen on very strong magnetic fields. Ditto for a lot of equipment. There is also the issue of powering the superconducting coils. Let's face it - if it is on an outward trip (to Mars and further away) the ship will need nuclear power as well.
Ok, I'll see your Israel and raise you....The Dominican Republic
Different cattle of fish. Dominican republic, India, etc - these are places where the traffic in general is insane.
In Israel it is specifically the taxi drivers. Rest of the population drives very reasonably (by the Mediterranean standards). Watching the local taxis take the next load of passengers late in the evening out of Ben Gurion is like watching a X-wing squad try to line up for a Death Star trench run. Changing 4 lanes in less than 2 secs, overtaking on all sides and passing the other taxi within less than a foot at 100+ km/h. I have done my share of travel around the world and no taxi drivers get anywhere near. Spain, Italy and even the darkest, deepest Eastern Europe (*) are tame compared to Israel.
(*) Like, for example, quoting my kids: "We are entering Bosnia and Herzegovina, You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." The origin of the quote is: the bastards asked 3Eu for 200m of incomplete motorway, followed by a speed trap where I was told that I am driving at 30Eu/h above the speed limit and the customs officer openly complaining on where is the 10Eu note folded in my passport and do I want my car searched.
And that is the key distinction: where a human driver would typically exercise caution, even if they were legally in the right, a computer follows the rules it has been programmed with.
Human "exercising caution" != Professional Taxi driver != Amateur Driver who got cocky moonlighting for Uber.
Out of all major players, Uber is in the worst possible position to build a self-driving car system. It is in possession of a gigantic set of driver data from its app so there is a huge temptation to use at least some of it. At the same time the set is very biased, because it is collected from people trying to drive like taxi drivers without being ones (*). If you feed it into a learning algo the result will be exactly that - a car trying to beat the yellow lights at 38mph in a 40mph zone. IMHO, there should be a regulatory condition on Uber being allowed to test - it mustn't use any data produced by people who "do not work" for it (quotes intended and needed).
(*) if you want an "authentic" taxi experience you will never forget, hire a taxi in Israel. Just make sure you have a spare change of clothes - you will need it. You will produce a couple of buckets of cold sweat from near misses - I have seen a taxi there overtake a police car which was going somewhere at full throttle with blue lights on.
There is no excuse for leaving an unsecured device connected to the net these days. I wonder how many bot-nets it participates in already.
Most likely none - OpenWRT does not have upnp NAT traversal by default, you need to install the package. My own ones sit behind spare ports on the WiFi access point running OpenWRT which has its config "inversed". It thinks that the ports on the "inside" are the hostile wild Internet. That is where the cameras, etc are. It allows the house to query them, but it does not allow them to get anywhere.
Then there's Ana Navarro who's claiming Trump has dementia.
There is a much simpler explanation to his outbursts. He is on prostate medication which as a side effect improves hair growth. This is according to HIS doctor and is in the public domain (public interview, quoted by most newspapers at the time). I am quoting EXACTLY what he said a year ago - you can find the ref in the newspapers yourself if you want to.
It takes 5 minutes to look up which prostate medications have that as a side effect as well as what other side effects do they have.
If you are too lazy the answer is testosterone derivatives and the side effects at a dose which is sufficient to induce extra hairiness are burst of rage, difficulty to control aggression, etc. Quite evident too.
Dementia - that one was a (TM) of Ronnie the Ray Gun. Trump so far has not exhibited the primary symptom, namely increase of federal grants for dementia study by an order of magnitude - you can plot them in the 80-es and they correlate 90%+ with Ronnie's "issues" in his later years.
4G or 8G of RAM?
Intel Core circa 2012. Limit hardwired at chipset level - 8G. Some consumer models were limited to even lower.
As a comparison, my earliest APU system - a Vaio with an E series APU I have from the same period (early 2012 model) has 16G, and its maximum theoretical limit is 64G. While most manufacturers had posted stupid fake spec limits like 2 or 4G for E series APU to make them look inferior to the Intel counterpart, in reality the limit was 32G for one DIMM systems and 64G for 2 or more DIMM systems. The real limiting factor ended up the lack of availability for non-ECC unbuffered memory DIMMs. Memory manufacturers did not ship > 8G at the time.
since they acctually work
So do A series.
The original E series low power APUs where a bit of a dud, but also work. Looking around me I have 10 APU based systems in the house - 3 laptops, one media center using a laptop version of the A series, one "proper" media center, 4 desktops and a mini-server. Every single one of them trounces the "equivalent" (quotes desperately needed) Intel from the same period. Every single one of them can be (and is) loaded with memory to the gills - up to 32G for laptops and up to 64G for desktops. Every one of them is still fit for purpose to be used today 5-6 years after the original purchase date. This was at a time when Intel deliberately crippled all consumer chipsets so that they are limited to 8G or even 4G of RAM.
The issue which investors were suing for is actually not described correctly in the article. In addition to being late, the original F1 socket for A series (and the mobile counterpart) was found to have some issues and had to be replaced by F2 leaving a huge stock of motherboards floating out there without matching APUs. What was the reason for the replacement we actually do not know, but the result was a lot of people pissed off in the supply chain. I have one F1 system and while a bit temperamental, it has been working 24x7x365 for 6 years now so no idea what the problem was in the first place. So in addition to being late AMD also did not deliver to spec.
In any case, I will still get an APU system if I need a computer on which to do real work on what I do for a living - Linux, virtualization, java and occasional document. In fact a brand new A12 is traveling in the post - should be here next next week raising the count of APU based systems in the house to 11.
Sooner or later we will all get there eventually.
It is a reality. The anonymity of the early Internet has long become faux anonymity. Today, it is simply a matter of how much resource does the opponent have to unveil your identity. All this does is decrease the amount of resource the authorities need to deploy to the level of "common plod with a search warrant".
It is simply a matter of time until our side of the globe follows suit.
I don't get why BGP doesn't have an inherent way to detect that such a path is dodgy
It is not in the requirements. It is however in the requirements for the system which provisions the BGP announcement in large SPs like Google and Verizon as well as filters incoming announcements.
This is a repeat of the usual idiocy of American private peering links.
In America most peering is private with secret peering policies. There are very few fat links between oligopolists and there is NO ACL on the route announcements. So if someone fat-fingers an announcement the whole system goes into meltdown. This has happened again and again and again and will continue to happen. The first time I remember was as far back as 1996? or 1997 when some small Florida SP experimenting with gated source took down most of the USA Internet for a couple of hours.
Compared to that in Europe most peering is public via peering points. Peering policies are PUBLIC and registered with RIPE in a format which is machine readable and everyone can form (and does form) an ACL on what to accept from a respective peer. As a result you get up to 3 points of enforcement: source, route server in the peering point, destination.
The issue here is - yanks never learn. Not invented here (in the great Silly Valley), hence does not exist. They keep being whacked by this on a regular basis, but continue to suffer and enjoy it.
How about Airbus and Rolls-Royce Holdings
1. Rolls Royce primary "Eu relationship" is being one of the multiple suppliers for airbus. There other main "sole" supplier is GE. There are also a couple of models where P&W does the engines. However, none of them does the majority today. That is produced by a set of incestuous joint ventures between all major players and some external ones.
The actual engine choice is done by the airline when placing the order. While some Eu airlines which have chosen Rolls Royce exclusively (very few) will be unhappy about it, it is up to them. Airbus does not care. If anything it may end up happier as it has to integrate one engine LESS and P&W and GE will very happily step in to fill the dual supply hole left by Rolls Royce leaving. There is definitely no issue here as far as Airbus is concerned and the other players will only enjoy RR leaving. Airlines will be annoyed, but if P&W offers them a sweetie their annoyance will be very short lived.
2. Airbus itself and its factories in South-West England which if memory serves me right produce mostly wings nowdays. While painful in the short term, there will be head over heals competition by all Eu governments to house an alternative factory site in the long term. In fact, Airbus may end up in an overall financial win from relocating this manufacturing due to indirect subsidies and logistical improvements. For example, if it moves the manufacturing to France, it no longer needs to drag them across half of a continent in a Beluga for assembly, etc.
The Tory-run government argued that the UK “starts from an unprecedented point of alignment with the EU”
No. It does not. UK law has been successfully challenged at the ECJ as inadequate more than once. By Davis himself on one occasion.
On top of that the ultimate arbiter for what can and cannot be done with Eu citizen's and businesses data is the ECJ.
I do not see how you can align both of these to the Tory BrExit platform.
Peter F Hamilton (apart from night's dawn, mostly due to the ending).
Charles Stross
Alastair Reynolds
Stephen Baxter
You missed Neil Asher. The only person to create a Sci Fi universe to compete with Bank's Culture. Granted, it is a competition which it loses, but it comes close second.
it is fairly easy to defeat it with a low-pass filter on the microphone.
Now try convincing let's say Google or Amazon to add it to their designs. If you are wondering why they are so reluctant to do so, I suggest running a spectrum analyzer on the audio section of the next TV advert. You will stop wondering when you notice the amount of "interesting" stuff in the higher frequencies.
Why not just put it into a s. korean shipping container
Take out 2-3km radius instead of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Unless you use a super-dirty bomb like Russian Status-6 project, but that would require NK to make a 50+ year step technologically so it is not yet on the menu.
Why would China start a war with the US
Both China and USSR (and as a consequence Russia) have a mutual assistance treaty with North Korea and are obliged to assist it in the event of an aggression by a foreign power. In fact, if memory serves me right, China is in the unenviable position where they are obliged to assist even if NK is the aggressor provided that the attack is coming from USA/South. Russia is supposed to be upon aggression. Both have classified annexes which are not available for public consumption so we do not know exactly what is in each of them.
Neither has rescinded sections or withdrawn in entirety from their treaties. They may do so if Fat Kim The Third does something really stupid, but have not done it so far.
In any case - finally someone saw the same thing I saw when we were discussing their last nuclear test. They do not need any fecking reentry vehicles. All it takes is 4-5 nukes to take out 95%+ of USA infrastructure. Two above East coast, one or two above West Coast, one above Texas.
The last casualty was paying for professional membership fees which were scrapped in December.
Once again - this is tax deductible during self-assessment by the employee. Same as ANY travel expense allowed by HMRC (that is all reasonable food off-site) up to whatever that allowance is in this financial year.
Same as with travel, food and lodging expenses if a significant amount of employees on the same PAYEE account start claiming it, the reports and analytics flag it, one or two get investigated and if the expenses are genuine HMRC has a conversation with the employer as they are not very happy paying for stuff which the employer should have paid.
Just because you get free coffee
Here is some news for you - you do. The HMRC accounting rules say so. You are entitled to be reimbursed for all reasonable expenses essential when traveling on business including food and lodging. Especially food and lodging.
The solution for Voda employees is very simple - keep all receipts, register for self-assessment and put all receipts towards the "legally entitled to, but not reimbursed by the company travel expenses" allowance. You can and SHOULD do this with ALL receipts where the company has been idiotic, unreasonable and has invented policies which violate both accounting rules and basic sanity.
In theory, this goes towards one of your allowances which is specific for this. In practice, HMRC gets very unhappy when it notices that everyone in a company ends up claiming it which usually results with the geniuses who formulate the policy having to back off on it in the next financial year.
BTRFS costs more in terms of CPU than the EXT family, but you get working de-dupe as well significant gains on flash and hybrid drives.
The de-duplication alone makes it worthwhile at least for me.
In any case, RHEL regularly declares that it will not support something with some fanfare just to climb down a few years later. Nothing new here, move along.
And why the hell would the french ministry of defense that satellite images of basically the most desolate region of earth?
The most-desolate region on Earth has been under intense observation ever since the Vela incident. It is the only place on Earth where you can test a nuke and nobody can attribute it to you (unless they sieve through months worth of data backlog).
That is why it is being observed quite carefully nowdays. At least more carefully than you would expect from observation of such a desolate area.
Should I feel safer if a see an A320 welcome card though?
No. Many airlines override this manually. All it takes is an airbus engineer to sign it off.
I have seen this happening on one well known UK airline more than once (I had to wait for 2h on one occasion until they found one as it was national holiday at the airport I was flying out of).
My exact thought.
An accident on the main street where our cul-de-sac leads comes to mind. I saw it with my own eyes around 10 years ago. Two teenage tw*ts were so engrossed in the conversation with each other that they pulled out less than 5 meters in front of a brand new E-class Merc. They were in a late 80-es (J reg I think) vintage Ford Fiasco rusty banger so if the Merc would have tried to brake it would have hit the driver door straight on. That would have been the end of at least the driver if not both of tw*ts, despite the Merc keeping to the posted 30 mph speed limit. The Merc driver threw the Merc onto the sidewalk where it ended up smashed onto a lamppost. The two idiotic tw*ts ignored him and continued to drive off (someone stopped them a mile down). The Merc driver got out visibly shaken, but without a single scratch.
Would a computer make the same life (or possibly death) decision facing the same situation? I doubt it. It will most likely attempt breaking and kill a person as a result.
What Eu.
This is a near verbatim copy of the recent Russian legislation after removing criminal responsibility for the directors.
The El Reg screamed bloody murder at the time as it included DNS servers and peering points as well as the ability of the government to issue an "isolate" order. They concentrated on that particular aspect and missed the rest which is surprise, surprise nearly the same as what we hear now from HMG.
By the way the "disconnect from net to keep the country running" order is not a bad idea. It should be in the legislation.
This is about a sexist arsehole full of shit sucking shit out of his fingers and talking out its arse uncorroborated conservative bullshit that has no grounds in scientific fact.
"Women are more susceptible to stress". Utter bullshit proven very well during WW2. No male allied pilot has ever managed to get anywhere near the number of combat sorties the night witches have clocked. The difference is > 4 times. No army has managed to replicate the success of the night witches bomber squadrons too - because they tried with males. Sure, macho, short term gorilla chest beating - that is what we do well. Now, flying every f*** night without a parachute, with a death sentence if caught in an antiquated crop duster and putting a 100 pounder from point blank range in-between Horst eyeballs. Night after night after night - to a total of 960!!! sorties. You call that "susceptible to stress"? F*** that. I can continue - snipers, radar operators, etc. Till this day Russian missile command employs > 50% women sitting in front of the radar screen and this is for a the same reason - they take long term repeated stress much better and there is no higher stress than being the person who assesses if this is a fluke or the beginning of WW3 3 times a week.
Coming back to our own turf - the best sysadmin and QA I have worked with were ladies (including some I have hired). That one is for the same reason - better long term stress endurance. Some of the best software developers I know are also ladies. Some of the best pen testers, debuggers, security analysis are ladies too. Some of the best scrum masters and engineering managers. And so on.
So frankly, applause to Google for firing him. Encore (desperately needed in the valley in many places).
For me, at least, ZFS is about a lot more than dedup
You can have dedup on Linux with BTRFS. I use it as standard for the NASes which store source code trees and NFS roots. Once you dedup, the difference compared to ext4 is staggering.
ZFS, however, is not just about dedup and there is no Linux fs which offers identical functionality. You need to use multiple components to get the same effect - btrfs, volume manager, etc.
Don't report such things! It gives May and Tories ideas!
Do not worry, they will ignore it.
This is the Chinese effectively acknowledging complete and unconditional surrender in the fight against end-to-end encryption. They have surrendered and are dealing with it the only technically feasible way - by installing endpoint control software.
May is more likely to eat a toad with slug sauce than acknowledge that there is no such thing as a viable encryption backdoor for government use only. So do not worry, she is not going to get the idea out of this one.
There are differences however.
Intel screwed AMD which had WORKING and often SUPERIOR gear. In the mid-2000-es I would have taken an Athlon instead of a Pentium 4 any day. I would still take an AMD A series instead of an Intel Core for consumer use any day too. The graphics performance is light years ahead of an Intel IGP. Always was and still is. The IT in my previous job, tried to mandate I use a Core 7 laptop with an Intel IGP card instead of my old A4 machine. It tried it. For 15 minutes. You could see the windows updated on a 4K monitor. It was like using Windows 95 with an ISA VGA card. While my reaction was "screw that", I have to admit - it worked.
That is NOT the case in mobile, CPE, etc. Whatever we say about Qualcomm, while it may have an "interesting" (quotes intended and needed) business model, its gear actually works. Ditto for Broadcom. Now compare it to the lousy runts Intel prints for LTE and Cable chipsets. Neither can be considered fully functional and working.
Battle of the Falklands is not that little known if you are interested in naval history.
It marks the end of squadron raider operations by Germans (and the weaker side in naval warfare in general) to be replaced by lone raiders in both WW1 and WW2.
Germans tried to copy the success of Karl Jessen's Vladivostok Cruiser squadron in Russian-Japanese war, but did not quite get it - you cannot run an operation like this without a base by just raiding fuel and supplies from enemy facilities.
The British also performed significantly better than the Japanese 10 years prior which is not surprising as they had 2 battlecruisers as a part of the squadron sent to deal with the Germans.
My Roomba can't detect our stairs.
It stops detecting them if stops measuring movement correctly. You need to clean the distance covered sensor which is just a HUGE replica of a an early 1990-es mouse and it will be back to its normal self.
Depending on the level of rubbish around it has to be done once every 5-10 runs. You pull the front wheel, observe the design, if you have ever disassembled a mechanical mouse giggle manically, clean, put it back.
Roomba has a minimum size of stairs which it will recognize. My extension is 9.5cm lower than the rest of the house and Roomba failed to recognize it until I put thick laminate flooring on the landing raising it to 9.8cm. So based on this experimental evidence (collected from 3 different models - 5xx series) it will work only for stairs above a certain step height.
Looking at the photo, the step height towards the pond is LOWER than normal. I cannot say if it is under 9.8cm looking from here, but it may be so, which means a Roomba will fail to detect it.
Probably because the majority of vocal remainers were adamant that another referendum should be taken (presumably over and over ad infitium) until they got the result they wanted. Despite democracy not working like that
That is exactly how democracy works. There is no reason for something which has been voted for in the past not to be revisited in the future. It is a key principle of democracy that ANYTHING can be voted on at a later date.
In fact, making a decision sacred is dictatorial. Hitler did it to great success with his referendum on changing the Weimar republic constitution. There were others.
So I suggest you either go and learn what a democracy is or buy some brown shirts. They complete you.
Have the cake and eat it?
That is the (rather timid and polite) English saying. Most of the continent uses a different metaphor which is significantly more apt in describing the situation:
Have your p*n*s in both hands and your soul in paradise at the same time
In any case, the issue with data-flows is that they are a reflection of business flows. If you cannot transfer the data you cannot do the business this data is for. This is the world we live in.
I had the pleasure of being behind a lorry carrying a container full of scrap on the A14 when it started losing bits of it. Driving down the road to see various bits of metal including what to be a car bonnet tumbling through the air and barely missing your windscreen by a few cm is not very funny.
I had to overtake it at 90mph+ with a "lead foot" praying that nothing else flies out of the top of the skip during the 15 or so seconds to do so and then call the cops to pull him over and secure the road (sharp metal through your tires is almost as pleasant as sharp metal through the windscreen).
But I do worry about the knock-on effects: there's an awful lot of other life out there in the food chain, and a lot of it starts with either the mosquito or its larvae
1. The effect of the insecticides on them is significantly worse
2. The niche occupied by the mosquito larvae is not unique, it will be filled by other mosquito larvae species. As a result the overall number of mosquitoes will not drop, what will drop will be the number of "dangerous" ones.
By the way - as a technique this is not new. It has been used for a couple of decades to tackle one of the nastier species of US flies - the one whose maggots bury into living flesh.
especially if it's a pharmaceutical company
This is the case in sciences and especially in life sciences. One of the reasons for this are a number of past scandals related to funding by Big Oil (the Lead scandals), Big Smoke (a whole lot), Big Agro (some more recent onces), etc.
What Google and the rest of the Valley keep funding are NOT scientific papers. It is public policy "research" and economics "research". These have always been a classic example of prostituting themselves to the highest bidder and they have a long standing tradition not to say who is paying for their services today.
Then dumbify it.
My smart TV is hooked up as a monitor to a small HP microserver upgraded with a decent video card (35-40W power consumption). All the smarts are in the server. So is half (5TB) of the content.
All the "smart" devices in the house sit on a subnet hanging off the server and are firewalled off the Internet. They get cut-down DNS, NTP addresses and that is it. Nothing more without approval.
I like it this way and it will stay this way until the consume electronic manufacturers relent on their idea of "socializing" all of my media via their smart TV interface. My media ideas are distinctly antisocial and I would like them to stay that way.
never had their face slapped by someone in authority (a parent?) when doing "inappropriate" actions.
Someone in authority is not the relevant slap here. The relevant slap is being slapped by the object of their inappropriate aspirations there and then. In public, in front of everyone else all the way until a proper black eye. Bonus points for nail traces under it. So that he has to explain to his wife exactly why he looks like that too (*).
That can easily be arranged by the way. Just ship them to a software shop in Bulgaria, Serbia (and most of Eastern Europe for that matter) for a few months for re-education. Israel is also a good place for that. The ladies there can fend for themselves, do not give a damn and take no prisoners. They are also traditionally applauded when they do that - cases like this never reach the Human Remains department. It does not happen very often too. This is probably because everyone knows that it can happen if you cross the line.
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